


light to circle round

by roadhymns



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: F/M, Photography, better just......stay put, can't open the door or it will ruin the photographs, good thing we are Consummate Professionals, in forced proximity, oh no we are all alone in a dark room
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:54:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22024402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roadhymns/pseuds/roadhymns
Summary: "I want to help with the development this time," Gaby tells him. "I want you to teach me how.""Not necessary," Illya says dismissively, rolling up his sleeves off his forearms."I am in the photographs," Gaby argues right back, "so I want to help develop them."
Relationships: Illya Kuryakin/Gaby Teller
Comments: 26
Kudos: 294
Collections: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Winter Holiday Gift Exchange 2019





	light to circle round

**Author's Note:**

  * For [redbrunja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redbrunja/gifts).



> Happy holidays, redbrunja! I'm so sorry this is late, but I hope you enjoy!
> 
> So this was an attempt to fill two prompts in one fic - _“something that takes place in the dark room”_ and _“post-Rome, either Gaby or Illya says they should ‘keep things professional’ since they are going to be working together indefinitely”_ \- and the length got away from me a bit.

Norman Maier is handsome, in a smug and unlikeable sort of way. He has sharp cheekbones and insolent hazel eyes, ash-blond hair and a pink cupid's bow of a mouth. 

Gaby cannot tell if she's not attracted to his particular combination of features, or it's only knowing that he would like to fence stolen nuclear components to madmen that makes him repulsive to her.

He knows he's good-looking, too, which is another strike against him, as far as she is concerned. Apparently, he's vain enough to make Napoleon Solo appear humble and self-effacing in comparison. _When he isn't plotting world destruction, he likes to model,_ Waverly had told them, handing over a dossier full of glossy photographs.

That had been the clearest route to their introduction to the man. Two days after they received their briefing, Gaby finds herself in the back of a towncar with Illya, who is posing as a photographer. 

She had been the one to bring him aboard, after the usual photographer today's fashion house contracted came down with a sudden and inconvenient illness, not long after they had cast Gaby for today's shoot. A terrible coincidence, that. Luckily Gaby, so eager to make her break in the modeling world, had jumped in with the number of another man she knew with experience behind a camera. And so it was all set up, quite easily, with only a little help from Waverly's people in making the initial connections.

After having to be a perfect facsimile of herself for her first mission, Gaby finds it much easier to slip into a completely new life for a few days, to pick up a cover and play it convincingly. At any rate, she finds it more comfortable than Illya apparently does, if the way he has spent the entire trip from the hotel fussing over his camera - loaded again with a roll of his specially-treated film - and the various accessories he's brought is any indication. She is caught between two impulses, neither of which are helpful for the situation at hand. To snap at him to calm down would only wind him up further; to reach out a hand to rest on his knee to steady him would betray a familiarity they are not to have to each other for this cover. Gaby just purses her lips and looks out the window, leaving him to fiddle.

She is swept away into a side room almost as soon as they arrive, where a representative from the fashion house they're to be modeling today is ready with a rack of ready-made garments. The clothes are stylish enough, she thinks - hopefully Illya will be somewhat appeased. Short figure-hugging dresses in a variety of bright hues, plenty of shoes - and a rack of lingerie. No, not lingerie, Gaby realizes: bikini-style swimsuits. There are half a dozen of them here, from pure white to a striping pattern in green and pink. The look for summer 1964.

An unforeseen wrinkle in the day's plans, this. Gaby feels her lips purse all over again. She is not thrilled about stripping down to practically nothing and letting a weapons dealer put his paws on her, but needs must. Her cover would do it, for the chance at modeling exposure, so Gaby will do it. It is Illya's reaction that concerns her. She feels instinctively that he will not like this.

The shoot goes about as well as could be expected. The whole first part with the dresses is fine enough, though Maier seems to take the absence of the usual photographer as license to constantly order Illya about. Gaby spends every moment Maier's back is turned leveling wide-eyed glares at Illya as he grows increasingly surly in response. 

Then, of course, comes the really exciting bit. She steps out in the first of the bikinis and feels the immediate weight of Illya's attention. He was in the middle of changing out the exhausted roll of film in the camera and nearly drops the fresh one when he sees her. His eyes are very wide and very blue, and he seems to be at a crossroads on how he will react to this.

Gaby brushes past him, back out to the garden with the fountain that has provided most of their backdrops so far. The ties on the sides of her swimsuit bottom bob against her hips, and Illya follows the movements of them with far more interest than their cover allows.

“Be sure to get my good side, would you?” she says to him, over her shoulder, and Illya’s eyes snap up to hers. For a moment, his expression is absolutely thunderous - but at the situation or at the teasing, she couldn’t really say. Then, with obvious effort, he squares himself up, swallows down whatever frustrated impulses are plaguing him. Good, Gaby thinks. The entire reason they’re here - the entire reason she is stuck playing a prop - is so he can take the photographs, so he had best do his part.

The first set of poses is to have her in the swimsuits and Maier dressed in street fashion, and she steels herself to be so exposed when everyone around her - everyone looking at her - is fully dressed.

There's a hint of chill in the air still; whenever she has to move from sunlight to shade, gooseflesh breaks out on her arms, and her nipples peak beneath the thin material of her swimsuit. Nobody wears swimsuits in March in this part of the world, Gaby thinks crabbily to herself.

Illya seems to be holding it together, if only barely. She gets the impression that, at any moment, he might decide to throw his jacket around her and bodily carry her away. Despite the ruinous nature of such an action for their mission success, she does allow herself to briefly indulge in the fantasy of it - a nice toasty jacket, Illya’s more familiar hands on her, and a location that would likely be somewhere warmer than here.

But that wouldn't happen, she reminds herself. Not anymore. If Illya is offended by what it happening in front of his lens right now, it is because he finds any humiliating circumstances disagreeable, when women are bearing the brunt of it. This is something she has seen time and again, in the months since their acquaintance. And she knows he considers her his own, but it is in much the same way he does Solo: she is his partner, his teammate - and no more.

Frustration blooms in her, misplaced but welcome enough, given the circumstances. He had been so possessive of her in Rome, so free with his hands. He had brushed softly over her skin, had tugged her along firmly when irritated. Held her up, held her steady, held her own hand in the crook of his elbow. She could not get his hands off of her for three solid days - and what’s more, she had not wanted to. Now, though, it sometimes seems as if she cannot get him to touch her at all. He keeps a meter between them whenever possible, only tugs her this way and that when immediate danger requires him to. The soft, lingering touches dried up the moment he realized they would be working together for the foreseeable future. It feels like a chastisement to her: if they are professionals, they will not want each other. If that is what it takes to be a professional, then unfortunately she still has a long way to go, she thinks angrily.

Anger is comforting. She is angry very often. It definitely distracts from Maier’s hands on her, at least, and his body pressed up against hers.

For one of the poses, she is to face the camera directly; Maier places his hand high up on her side, close enough to brush the underside of her slight breast. Gaby angles her body just that much more toward the camera. They will not get a much clearer shot, if indeed there is radiation to be captured on that film of Illya’s.

The shutter clicks, Illya winds the film, and he looks down and away from the two of them.

After the shoot is finished and Gaby is back in her own clothes at last, Maier tells her she will stay for dinner. It is not an invitation; it is a command. 

Behind her, Gaby hears Illya pause in putting his camera equipment back into the various cases. This is where the real danger of a broken cover lies, she realizes. A step too far for him, to have a partner out of sight, alone with an enemy. She has become proficient in reading the tones of Illya’s silences, and she would bet a fair amount of money that if Maier attempts to force this issue, his modeling career will be quite over.

"Maybe next time," Gaby purrs at Maier, in a tone as low and smoky as she can make it, when she wants instead to slap him. "If you have me back for another shoot."

Maier seems to find that a little funny, at least. Refuge in audacity, from a poor model hopeful. Just then, the assistants from the fashion house come bustling back out with their racks of clothing - hers and his - and she uses it as an excuse to slip away, back to where their towncar waits on the gravel drive outside. Illya follows her like a shadow, much more swiftly and quietly than a man of his size and temperament carrying that many bags should be able to manage.

The ride back is as silent as the first one, both of them aware of the unfamiliar driver. Illya’s fingers are tapping out a drumbeat on his thigh; the line of his jaw is tense.

Gaby picks at the flouncy skirt of her gauzy day dress, lifting and rearranging it around her thighs. She’s still chilled from earlier, and wishes it was heavier. She looks over at Illya in time to see him wrench his eyes away from where the hem lies just above her knees. Gaby tugs the skirt a little lower, and he does not look away from the window for the rest of the ride.

The towncar drops her off at the hotel in which she is known to be staying; Illya has a room there as well, but he has asked to be dropped off some blocks away, to appear as if he has an apartment somewhere in the city.

Gaby only detours to her own room long enough to wash up and change, from the dress she had worn to the shoot into a warmer and more practical pair of capris. She is discomfited, and she does not know why. After she has freshened up, she heads straight for Illya's room, and lets herself in by picking the lock as Solo taught her to do. 

She wishes, in this moment, that Solo was here with them. He has an ease to him in fraught situations that serves to settle her in turn; if he had been there this afternoon, she's sure he could've smoothed things over with a few acerbic comments and a lewd look or two. She and Illya alone - they spark against one another, too sharp and too emotional. Even now, when they are nothing to each other but partners, when the relationship between them is strictly professional, they are always in danger of setting the other alight.

Illya returns about twenty minutes after she does, letting himself in with his key. He's ditched much of the extra gear he'd had with him for the shoot, the tripod and the lighting equipment, everything but his own camera in its little leather case. He sees her sitting upon the edge of his bed, one leg crossed over the other, and rolls his shoulders before looking away without comment.

After setting down the camera case, Illya strips off his suit jacket and tosses it over the back of a chair. Gaby notes this with interest - he is more worked up than he would like to let on, if he is not hanging it properly on a rack. He sheds his tie next, then undoes the buttons at his collar, steadfastly avoiding looking at her.

“You’re going to develop the film this afternoon?” she asks, breaking the silence.

“Yes,” he says, his focus not on her, but on undoing the buttons at his wrists.

"I want to help," Gaby tells him. "I want you to teach me how."

"Not necessary," Illya says dismissively, rolling up his sleeves off his forearms now, unbuckling his watch and pocketing it.

"I am in them," Gaby argues right back, "so I want to help develop them."

The slant of his mouth is stubborn, from what she can see of it. Usually he is pleased by her wanting to pick up more tricks of the trade; there is a never-ending list of minutiae that he despairs of her not knowing. She is a quick study, and knows more than he gives her credit for, but one of the easiest ways to win him over is to ask him to teach her something. Not so today, it seems.

“I’m not leaving,” she adds. It is a threat, and it gets him to look over at her at last.

“I do not need you,” he tells her, flat.

Gaby is stung, more than she would like to show. “I didn’t ask if you needed me,” she says, drawing herself up, embarrassment and fury turning her spine to steel. “I asked you to show me _how to do our job._ ”

Finally, this seems to cow him, and those broad shoulders sag a little. “Stubborn,” he mutters to himself, as if it is an oath, but he begins to unpack the necessary gear anyway.

The bathroom does not have counter space to speak of, and the sink is only a shallow decorative basin set upon a little stand, with rows of narrow shelves bracketing it. It is not ideal for the many tools of the trade Illya is pulling from the large case he brought with him, but as it is the only room available to them without a window, it will have to do.

Illya pulls a nightstand in with them, to give them a table to work upon. It takes up all of the room between the bathtub and the door. The area is claustrophobic already, and Illya seems to fill up all remaining space in the room, with his physical presence and his sour mood.

There is no safe place to be, here - every flat surface must be pressed into service to have enough room for all of the equipment. They must keep shifting around one another, again and again, to check this or that, to duck under the lines of cord he has hung from the shower curtain rod to the towel racks.

It is easy here, in the tight confines, to reach out, to curve her hand around the warm expanse of his side. She must maneuver around him, after all.

Illya lays his hand atop of hers, holds it there for a moment. She feels called out, that he should acknowledge the touch this way, but soon he twists himself away, and she is left feeling that perhaps she misread the moment.

Soon the makeshift darkroom is ready, every spare inch taken up by trays, by cords, by lights. The sink is home to a medium-sized canister, currently disassembled. There is a spool, a two-piece lid, and the tank itself; on the narrow shelves bracketing the sink, he has lined bottles of chemical solutions, pre-mixed and ready to go.

“Developer,” he says, pointing them out to her one by one. “Stop bath. Fixer. These will develop the film, make it safe for light, give us negatives to make prints from.”

Illya retrieves the rolls of film from his pocket, tumbles them in his hand contemplatively. Gaby senses the hesitation in him; he would rather be doing this alone. She feels a surge of irritation well up within her. This is not her fault, but it is her mission, and she has every right to be here.

“Well,” she snips, “let’s get started, then.”

Illya hesitates a moment more, looking at the two rolls of film. Finally, with little huff of irritation, he pockets one and sets the other on the shelf next to a bottle opener.

"First part," he tells her, "must be total darkness. Understood?"

"Yes, fine," Gaby says impatiently.

In a frustrating design choice, the lightswitch for the main fixture is actually outside the room, on the wall near the entry. Illya leans out of the open door and flips it. The last moment of light, as Gaby’s eyes struggle to adjust, is just him haloed golden against the afternoon sun, and then he shuts the bathroom door behind him. Instantly, they are plunged into blackness.

The darkness makes everything feel warm and close, shrinking the already miniscule room into something that feels no larger than a closet. She quickly becomes aware of her own breathing, and tries to quiet it, afraid he might hear it too.

After a long minute, Illya says “Do you see any bleed?”

“What?” she asks, confused, looking over at where she knows him to be.

“Light bleed,” he clarifies. “Should be able to tell, by now.”

Gaby looks around the inky darkness. There are no spots of light anywhere - the doorframe is well-fitted, and she had seen Illya roll a towel to block light that might come from beneath the door itself. “No,” she tells him. “I don’t see anything.”

"Good," Illya says. He's moved directly behind her now - his voice comes from over her shoulder, and she can feel the heat of him up against her back, even though he isn't touching her. “Then it is safe to proceed.”

Then one of his hands finds her forearm, slides down along it, until her hand is covered with his own.

"First," he says, voice low in the darkness. "we open the canister, to get at the film." His hands on hers, he guides her through reaching over to the low shelf to the left of the sink, where he left the film a few minutes before. Her fingers close over the canister, and then he has her pick up the bottle opener that was next to it.

This was a mistake, she realizes. She can feel him in the dark, even where he is not touching her. The hairs on the back of her neck have risen, her heart rate picking up. She wants to do something foolish, like turning and kissing his bicep, so close now to her face.

He would not thank her for it, she thinks. She regrets the chance she missed in Rome, when she had him in the palm of her hand. But she had been an innocent then, in his eyes - now she is an agent, a partner. She is out of bounds, and yet she still wants him. It is a maddening place to be.

Her fingertips are numb; she can feel Illya moving her hands, and she should be paying closer attention to what he is doing, what he is saying. She's achingly aware of him pressing up closer against her, and not actually focusing on the task at hand at all. He fits the bottle opener to the canister in her hand, then she feels the flex of his forearm as he pops the bottom of it off, arms going tight around her. She inhales, just a little.

"Gaby?" he asks, stilling.

“Yes?” she replies, shaking it off.

Illya hesitates, then says, “We must load the film onto the spool now.”

Still in darkness, they grope in the sink until Gaby’s fingers find the spool. Then there is just the matter of transferring the film onto it, placing it in the tank, and fitting the first, light-proof part of the lid onto the contraption.

“Safe enough, now,” he says low, next to her ear, and Gaby manages not to shiver by only the narrowest of graces.

Illya reaches up above them, fumbles for a moment, then manages to flip on the safety light he’d hung from one of the high shelves. After total darkness, even the low red of it seems bright, and Gaby blinks. She looks up and sees herself in the little round mirror above the sink, cast in a bloody hue, and Illya bracketed huge behind her. Her own face looks surprised, open; she hates to see it, but is glad for the chance to school it away before he could see it as well.

Illya seems unphased by the light, himself, and too busy for reflections. He reaches over, takes the bottle of developer off one of the lower shelves, and hands it to her.

She fills the tank and places the top part of the lid on as instructed, while he looks on. 

"Shake," he says. Gaby immediately does as asked, giving the canister a gentle tumble, listening to the solution inside slosh around.

"No," Illya says, and reaches out to cover her hands again and _really_ shake it.

"All right, all right," Gaby says, pulling from his grip, grateful that the red light means he won't see if a flush has appeared on her cheeks. Her feverish desires of just a few moments ago, of relishing his hands upon her, suddenly feel shameful again under his impatient eyes. He had not wanted her here, she remembers suddenly, no matter how soft and deep his voice in the darkness.

He turns half away from her, pulls his watch from his pocket to check the time.

"Stop," he tells her, after some time. She's happy enough to do so; the canister isn't light, and the vigorous movement required was starting to make her arms burn. 

But it turns out she isn’t relieved of her duties just yet - it takes several more agitation-and-rest turns with the developer, then she must pour it out into the sink and repeat with the stop bath and fixer. A strong vinegar-like scent fills the room, and it’s almost a relief, the way the smell of the chemicals, the precise timing required, the physical action of shaking the tank cuts through the madness of wanting Illya. She has lived her life these past months hopping from distraction to distraction; she can continue doing that. She won’t debase herself with wanting a man who can’t be bothered to give a damn about her like that.

Finally, after a last rinse period with clean water, Illya declares the processing done. He takes the tank from her, pops it open, and retrieves the spool from within. Gaby looks on curiously, but he turns from her, closer to the safety light. He unwinds a little of the film to check the first few negatives, then his shoulders square off.

He pulls the rest of the negatives from the roll, and she can see enough to know that they are ostensibly developed - shapes and colors flash by, instead of the blankness of undeveloped or ruined film. He snips the roll into strips quickly, gruffly, without looking too long at any one negative. That done, he pins the pieces to the line above the bath to dry, as far from her as possible.

"Well?" Gaby asks impatiently, as he puts up the last of them. "Did you get anything good?"

"We must develop the other roll," Illya says shortly, and Gaby's heart sinks. That means perhaps there was no trace of radiation on Maier, and their trail has gone cold.

Illya turns in the narrow space between the tub and the sink to grab the film tank, intending to rinse it so they could start again, and Gaby uses the opportunity to peer up at the negatives herself, tiny and hard to see in the low red light.

Despite the diminutive size and the surrounding darkness, however, she immediately notices the bright flare of radiation in many of them.

All of the photographs have her in them, twenty-four shots of her bared stomach, her dancer’s legs. This is the roll he reloaded halfway through the shoot, the one that contains all of the photographs of her in the bikinis. In most of them, Maier is there too, lurking behind her or crowded up near her side, his hands somewhere upon her skin. He is touching her waist, or her thighs, or her arm - Illya managed to capture the moment when he had her by the neck, as well. Gaby scrubs a hand there, at the same place his fingers are in the photograph, reliving the sensation, quite against her will.

But, near the end of the roll, a peculiar phenomenon: Maier does not appear, and she is not posing. In one strip, there are four shots, the last of the roll, of her alone: standing unawares, half turned from the camera, the curve of her back on display. Illya has pinned this one closest to the wall, out of the way, but Gaby reaches up and plucks it down anyway, careful to keep her fingers off the drying images.

The roll ends on an image of her with her hand upon the frame of the elegant french doors to the patio, looking over her shoulder toward the camera. That had been the barest instant, just her checking that he was following, checking to see that she would not be alone in the house with a man she had not trusted, who had spent the afternoon pawing at her. And yet in this tiny negative, it could've been a pose held for hours: it might've been painted by a romantic. He must've been following her with the lens, to have captured it in the half-second it happened. 

She turns her eyes from the vulnerability she can read in her own expression, and looks instead to Illya, who has stopped to watch her make her inspection. He is leaned back against the sink, hands gripping the edge of the basin behind him.

His eyes sweep over her in the red of the safety light, his colorless irises nearly swallowed by the blackness of his pupils. She wonders what she looks like to him - he had spent the afternoon looking at her through a viewfinder, bathed in sunlight, her limbs bare to him. Is this a poor contrast, the odd glow, her practical capris?

“You got my good side,” she says lightly, flicking the strip of negatives she is holding up so he can see.

He swallows, the dip of his adam’s apple obscene in the low light.

“We don’t have to develop the other roll,” she tells him. “There is plenty here to work with.” She twists to look at the strips hanging above her head. “Any of these,” she says.

Illya pushes himself back upright again, crowds in closer to her. There is still reluctance in him. After a minute, he gives a grumbling sigh, then pulls down a different strip. He turns away from her, to where the enlarger has been set up on the floor in the corner, its power cord snaking along the baseboard to the only other available outlet, and falls into a crouch.

While he reaches beneath the sink to find and open the package of light-sensitive print paper, Gaby leans close over him to peer curiously at the selected negatives. They are imperfect, to say the least: Maier's hands are not completely in any one shot, the glowing trail of the gamma radiation partially obscured behind props, behind structures, behind his own body. Usable, for their purposes, but there are better shots available to them, Gaby can see.

“Use this one,” she says, twisting to pluck down another negative and pass it to him. It is the shot she took such pains to line up for him, Maier’s hand high on her side, in full view of the camera. It makes her a little queasy, to see the glow of the radiation against her skin, but it delivers their objective perfectly.

“No,” he says, barely even giving it a glance, adjusting the enlarger.

Gaby leans into him, her diaphragm pressed against the bulk of his shoulder. “What do you mean, no?” she demands, holding it in front of his face. “It’s perfect.”

He exhales sharply through his nose, looking up at her from the corner of his eye. “You realize whatever print we make, it is evidence, yes? It goes in reports, it will be on file. You want this on file?”

She pauses, considering that. Illya turns back to his work with the enlarger, as if there is no more to be said about it, as if her mind should be as made up as his. And his mind is clearly made up, which means he has been thinking about it. He shrugs his shoulder, as if trying to push her off of where she leans against him, eyes fixed on the subpar negative he has selected.

“Ah,” she says, and all at once things click into place. “ _You_ do not want this on file.” 

He wanted to develop the film alone so he could decide which negatives to use. All of his little hesitancies, his agitations, can be explained by the fact that he had carelessly tucked both rolls of film in his pocket, thinking he would be developing them alone, and afterward did not know which would contain the shots that had her fully dressed. The safe roll, the appropriate one.

He is trying to protect her, but he is also trying to protect himself. He thinks this reveals something about him. Gaby looks again at the last strip, where she is alone in all four shots. If he meant only to burn the last of the frames of the roll, he could’ve shot anything. 

And yet, and yet.

"Were you jealous, Illya?" she asks, growing sly in her confidence. She can feel how he has gone stiff, wary. She flicks out the strip of negatives in front of his face again, the set of images showing the curve of her own body, the path of another man's hands. She leans heavier into his shoulder. "Did you want to be touching me like he was?"

He stands suddenly, actually dislodging her this time, and turns like he means to go - but there is absolutely nowhere to flee to. He twists in the tiny space left to them, like a wolf caught in the smallest of cages.

She is right. She cannot believe it.

"I wished it was you," she says. It's not even a lie, considering her thoughts in the dark a little while before. How many times since Rome has she thought of his hands on her again, roaming over her skin with intent? Maier's hands had been soft, clammy, at odds with possessive clutching he'd done at her body. She knows from experience that Illya's are cool, callused, with incredible strength that he will gentle for her. Yes, she wished it was him. She always does, these days.

He stills at that and makes a noise in his throat, distressed. She senses blood now; she did not intend to trap him in here with her and make him finally give her some straight answers, but she certainly isn’t going to let the opportunity slip away.

“It can be,” she tells him, maneuvering around to put herself in front of him. She takes him by his bare wrist and places his hand upon her hip. He watches her do it with breathless attention, his mouth open just slightly, his face in red and dramatic shadow.

"Gaby," he says. She can hear it in his voice - this is a bad idea. They are partners, professionals. His resolve is not stronger than her own, though.

She moves his hand up, off her hip, slipping it under the cotton of her top. His touch is cool, as she expected it to be, but this time she is prepared. He stares at the way her shirt is rucked, the stretch of skin between the raised hem and the waist of her capris. She guides his hand now, as he did hers earlier. She brings it to curve instead over the bare skin of her ribs, his thumb resting against the gentle swell of her breast over her brassiere, and she pins him there with her own palm.

His eyes flick up to hers, away from where his hand disappears under her shirt.

She tips her chin up at him, challenging, with significantly more bravado than she actually feels.

For the span of a few heartbeats, they only look at each other in the red of the safety light. Then Illya seems to gather himself, a second's worth of steeling, and she thinks he is doing so to pull away, to chastise her again for breaking the rules of their wretched unspoken agreement to pretend that they do not want one another.

And then he is ducking in to fit his mouth to hers, the press of his lips tentative, like this spell could be shattered if he senses the least amount of resistance.

Gaby immediately seizes a handful of his hair with her free hand, dragging him down a little more, holding him there so she can deepen the kiss without worrying that he will try throwing himself to the far corner of this laughably small room. Illya grunts at the rough treatment, a little sound in his throat that zings straight between her thighs.

They break apart, but only for a moment, before Gaby is going after him again with a series of quick, hot kisses. He steadies her with his free hand on her jaw, then adjust the angle to kiss her again as he wants: deeper, hungrier, unmistakably wanting.

So this is why he would not touch for her months, Gaby realizes. Because if he did, she would be able to read him immediately. He is in no better shape than she. She wants to laugh; she also wants to shove him down and hear him apologize for making her wait all this time for no reason but his own stubborn sense of propriety.

Now she will always associate the smell of vinegar with this, Gaby realizes, a little hysterically.

Illya is still touching her like she guided him to, and Gaby breaks away long enough to reach down and take the hem of her shirt. With a twist, she pulls it off over her head, then drops it in a heap next to the tub. Illya inhales sharply, his attention suddenly stolen by the unimpeded sight of his own hand on her, how much of her side he covers with the broad width of his palm.

“Here?” he asks, raw. He is unsettled, eyes roaming now over her face, to the door, back over to the print paper he has stashed, open, on the low shelf. His hand flexes against her side, the calluses on his thumb catching rough against the lace of her brassiere.

"Do you really want to wait?" she asks him. There is no acting involved in the smoky tone of her voice now - she wants him, has wanted him, and intends fully to make him hers as soon as possible.

lllya glances up over her shoulder at the door again, longingly. He is a man of contradictions, his capacity for violence in direct contrast to his gentle reverence when he is touching her. She has no doubt that he would very much like to take her to his bed, out in the other room, and slowly peel the last of her clothing from her, cataloging the sights of her in more natural light. He would probably like to make protracted love to her, slow and meaningful, something that would befit the extraordinary delay they have suffered. 

And if he opened that door right now, he would ruin all of the print paper they have on hand, and they would be stuck with only the negatives.

Gaby, for her part, has had quite enough of waiting. 

She tugs Illya back down again, and he yields to her easily. She backs up, and he follows, a pair of small half-steps, until her hips hit the flimsy nightstand he dragged into the room for the extra flat work surface. He boosts her up onto it, and she nudges the tray of developer solution behind her a little further back, out of the way.

"Gaby," he says again, sounding lost, glancing down over her bare shoulders, skating his palms over her sides. There is less of her on display at the moment than there was this afternoon, but now she is here, available to him to touch. It's an incomparable difference.

He sinks back to a crouch, but this time it is between her legs. He looks good there, glancing up at her from under his long lashes. They tease her, he and Solo, about liking chances to be tall for a change - but she will admit that there is a certain unparalleled pleasure in having Illya Kuryakin look up at her. That he is currently doing so while situated between her thighs only heightens the sensation.

He leans up, kisses her again, more sure than before. Then he begins to work his way slowly downward, trailing down her jaw, her neck. He places a kiss to her sternum, just above her breasts, and Gaby wonders if he can hear the kick of her heart. His hair is so soft under her fingers.

It has been so long denying the way she felt in Rome - the distinct impression she had gotten, by that third day, that he would be an attentive and worthwhile lover - that she feels shocked by it all over again.

He pulls down the top of her brassiere, presses his mouth to the sensitive skin there. His hand slips around her back to find the fastenings, but she stills him.

“Leave it,” she tells him. He pauses, glances up to her face. She looks down at him, impassive, willing him to read her intentions. It’s not exactly the same as the bikini tops she had been wearing earlier, but it is close enough. She feels his fingertips press hard into her back, five distinct points of pressure, and then he gives a little growl and ducks to kiss above her navel instead. 

She helps him with the button of her capris, and he helps her tug them down off her hips. He pushes up on the balls of his feet, just long enough to get them off completely, tossed to join her top against the side of the tub.

That done, he resettles on his haunches, one large hands on each of her legs, guiding her knees apart. Gaby reaches behind her to grab the edges of the little table for balance, feeling the heat rise in her face for his careful study. What he thinks is worth seeing in the low red light is beyond her; her panties are only a scrap of lace to match the brassiere.

Illya leans in, kissing first one thigh, then the other. The anticipation is agonizing, and it takes all of her willpower not to tug his hair and put him where she wants him. He seems content now to take his time, washing warm breath over her, sucking soft marks into her skin. She is squirming by the time he kisses her through the lace of her panties, with just enough pressure that her hips jerk.

He presses in again, lapping at her through the fabric, soaking it, driving her half-mad with the rough friction.

"God, Illya," she hisses through gritted teeth, fingers splayed around the back of his neck. She lifts her hips from the table as best she can, desperate for more, more.

Instead, he pulls back just enough to draw the tip of his nose up along the crease of her thigh, to pepper soft kisses just under her navel. "I have wanted," he manages, voice thick, "for so long - "

“Well now you have it,” she cuts in, voice reedy with the need she feels for him to _just get on with it._ Illya looks up at her again, boyish like he’s still coming to terms with his luck, and she cannot help herself: she reaches out and cups his cheek in her palm. The hesitation that held him back all these months is gone, now that he has decided on this course of action, but there is a sense of wonderment to him still.

He turns his head a little, to brush his lips against her palm, and her heart trips, feeling tender and bruised for how much she has been wanting this, since Rome.

“Illya,” she murmurs.

He drops his eyes from hers, clearing his throat. “You want these to stay too?” he asks, back to the task at hand, slipping a finger into the elastic of her panties, tugging a little. He could rip them with so little effort, she realizes - no more than a moment’s bite of against her hips, and they’d be in pieces.

“Yes,” she tells him, and watches him swallow.

On they stay, and he settles back to breathe warm against the soaked fabric, making her shiver. He follows orders well enough, but he’s not above bending the rules a little, it seems - he slips two fingers under the lace and moves it aside, and before she can say a word about it, he licks straight over her folds. She clutches at his head, her breath a high inhale. He huffs a laugh then, the absolute monster, and does it again, parting her with the tip of his tongue.

Gaby slings her knees around his shoulders, as if he could get away from her, her heels pressing sharp into his shoulder blades as he gets to work in earnest. His tongue and lips are soft against her; he suckles at her clit, giving her more whenever she asks for it. By the time he decides he may take the liberty of pressing a finger into her, she is desperate for it, her thighs trembling around him. He groans against her, when he feels how wet she is.

By the time her orgasm is upon her, he is pumping two fingers in and out of her, breathing hard like he is the one being tormented like this. She comes on a gasp that, even to her own ears, sounds indignant: that he could be this good, that he made her wait so long for this and then come so soon.

She is so greedy. Even as he milks the rolling contractions of her orgasm, lengthening it, strengthening it, she is already desperate for more. She pulls him up by his undone collar, hands twisting into the fabric, and feels herself clench around nothing as his fingers slip out of her.

This next kiss is not soft or gentle, but anticipatory in a new way. She bites at his mouth, licking into her own taste, and Illya groans again. His eyes are tightly closed, his brows drawn as if in pain. He is leaned over her now, one hand gripping the edge of the table for balance.

She looks down, and even in the low light, his own need is quite clear. She reaches out, picks the buckle on his belt half-undone, and Illya grinds out a vicious-sounding string of Russian.

“This is not what I would choose,” he adds in English afterward, rough and low like it’s being pulled unwillingly from him. It confirms her suspicions: now that he has committed to this, he would like so much to be good for her, and he does not consider a tumble in a hotel bathroom acceptable.

Gaby feels a swell of fondness for him, and she threads her fingers back into his soft hair, ruffled loose now from its neat part. If she has her way, there will be plenty of time for him to be good for her in the future. She pulls him back down to kiss him, gentling it again to something she hopes is reassuring. Illya sighs into it, and she feels him relax a little under her hands, between her knees. “It’s what I am choosing,” she says, just a whisper from his mouth, and kisses him again to chase the words.

It appears this is the magic spell - his resolve sets all at once. He leans back from her, just enough to finish unbuckling his belt, to undo the button and zip, and she helps shove his slacks and briefs down just enough to free his cock. He is proportional, she is quite pleased to note.

She reaches out to touch, to draw her fingers along the length of him, through the wetness at the tip, and he lets out a ragged breath and circles her wrist with one hand. “Please, do not,” he asks her. Normally, she would happily ignore a request like that, just out of her own desire to see him undone, but he sounds as if he is on a knife’s edge - just from getting his mouth on her, a wonder she is going to love dwelling upon later. And she does indeed want more from him, right now, so she allows him to move her hand off of him, onto the relatively safety of his hip.

After a moment, Illya moves back into the cradle of her hips, as close as he can manage, leaning over her on the table. He tugs her panties aside again and notches himself against her, groaning as he runs the head of his cock through the slickness of her folds, soaking wet from his attentions, from her climax. She lifts her hips, encouraging, and finally, finally he begins to push in.

He works his way deeper with short, shallow strokes, huffing little breaths into her hair, like it requires all his self-control not to snap his hips forward and take her all at once. At last he is fully within her, and he pauses for a moment, as if to collect himself.

“It’s good?” she asks him sweetly, to cover for the stretch she feels. 

“Yes,” he grits out, “but I think you know this.”

His hands are firm on her hips, and suddenly he tugs her forward, to the very edge of the table, and the whole thing wobbles dangerously.

"Illya," she warns, hearing the slosh of the developer solution in the tray behind her, but it is his turn to ignore her. 

He pulls out of her, almost completely, then thrusts back in. Each stroke sends a shock up her spine, and she finds herself gripping at him as he bows over her. She gets great handfuls of his shirt, pulling herself up into him, pulling him down into her. His pace is picking up, losing care in favor of the pleasure of it, and she tips her head back to kiss at his jaw and throat, whatever she can reach. 

The little table shakes, banging into the wall behind it. It’s hardly meant to hold up against the rigors of a heavy lamp resting upon it. She and Illya have broken sturdier furniture with less intent than this. Sure enough, the strain proves to be too much, and suddenly she hears the crack of the table leg buckling, then feels the swoop of the table collapsing beneath her. In a move that feels perfectly rehearsed, Illya gets an arm beneath her hips to keep her from falling, then steps back, holding her full weight, her knees locked tight around his hips.

He pivots, and her back hits the door with a hollow-sounding thud. The whole thing is the work of a moment, and she laughs, breathless and disbelieving, as he puts his lips to her neck and begins to move within her again.

Damn the photographs, Gaby thinks. She has waited long enough for this.

She wraps her arms tighter around him, clawing at his shoulders for purchase as her back slides along the door with each thrust of his hips, hard enough that she thinks she might tear the fabric of his shirt.

She feels pleasure cresting again, his cock so thick inside her that it hits something sweet perfectly with each fast stroke. She cannot usually come without a hand or a mouth on her clit, but if he keeps this up for much longer…

But his breathing grows ragged in a way she has rarely heard from him, his thrusts turning sloppy.

“Not yet,” she begs, clutching at him, digging her nails into the back of his neck. “Illya, not yet - ”

He makes a noise like a dying man, and she can feel the way his core draws tight. He hisses in a breath through his teeth as he rests his forehead against the door next to her. And then, miraculously, he continues on, fucking into her again, fast and even and deliriously good. There is a tremble in his thighs, in his shoulders, from the strain of holding back for her, and if Gaby were not already on a collision course for her next orgasm, this might be enough to tip her over.

The first sharp roll of her climax shoots through her between one thrust and the next and she slaps a palm back against the door, desperate for the leverage to move against him and finding none, held as she is. She can do nothing but curse and writhe and ride it out, her knees locking tight around Illya’s hips.

The arm he is not using to support her weight snakes around her, between her back and the door, and he tugs her hips in flush against his own as, with a low noise, he finally comes as well.

Their breathing begins to calm after a time, and Gaby trails her fingertips from the sweat-damp hair at his nape, along the collar of his shirt, and finds the place where he had unfastened several buttons earlier. She plucks one more free, giving herself enough space to slip inside, to feel the incredible heat of his chest, skin to skin. She flattens her palm over the coarse hair and feels the steady and slowing thumping of his heart beneath her hand.

“You said this is not what you would choose, earlier. What would you have chosen?” she asks him, indulgent now in the afterglow.

Illya huffs against the shell of her ear. “I liked this,” he rumbles, obviously loath to disparage their first taste of one another now that it has finally happened. His hand is still splayed huge in the small of her back: possessive, protective. She likes it, she finds, when it is him.

Gaby rolls her eyes a little, fond, knowing he cannot see her do so. “When you thought about this, Illya,” she tries, taking a different tack, “about you and I, what did you think about?”

He hums, then leans back a little so he can look at her. His eyes are still colorless in the light of the safety lamp, but there is no mistaking the softness in them. He ducks his head, presses a gentle kiss to her mouth, then one to her chin.

“Kissing you, very often,” he tells her, like this is a shameful little confession, that a grown man should dwell so much on kisses. “And also being - beneath you. So that I could see you. So that you could take your time.”

“Very romantic,” she tells him. The red light that hid her flush earlier is hiding his now, but he is betrayed by the warmth of his cheek when she rests her palm there.

She reevaluates what she had thought he wanted earlier, imagines herself straddling him, working herself open on his cock at her own pace, relieving some of the burden of patience and gentleness from him. She can give him that, she decides. She can be good to him as well, if they are to have a hope of making this work.

"We must finish making the prints," she says, still cupping his cheek. He blinks at her for a moment, as if somehow, with developer splashed all over the wall next to them where the table collapsed, he has still managed to forget why they are here. “I would like to get out of this little room, Illya.” She presses a kiss to his brow, and then adds, significantly, “And I would like to see you beneath me.”

His eyes darken, and he ducks in to kiss her again, sweet and bruising, before finally letting her slide down to her own unsteady feet.

Yes, she can be good to him. In a little while.

“Of course, we must first process the other roll of film,” she informs him lightly as she reaches for her capris, and delights at his indignant noise. “You were right, I don’t want those photographs in the report.”


End file.
